So it isn’t OK for Juan Williams to express caution about how we react to Muslims in religious garb, but it is OK for other supposedly respectable journalistic institutions to denigrate Catholic figures in any way they choose?

Archbishop Dolan is right, of course. Such inaccuracy in the priestly sexual scandal is an example in which I observed them still, still after years have passed referring to the Catholic pedophilia scandal. It was priests abusing young men just entering or having entered puberty NOT pedophilia. THen when this oversight on their part is brought to their attention, they deny even hearing the message.
AND YET, the public schools in the USA, unfortunately, are in the paper daily with a teacher or coach somewhere in the USA, having abused some child for X-number of months or years and the parents knew nothing! No media coverage that this public school child abuse issue is rampant…no investigation from the media..
..they just don’t want to hurt the feelings of the homosexuals as being abusers of young men, vulnerable young men and women, as well. So they cover it up and make readers think that priests are the culprit. I would not read the NYT if someone paid me to do so! They are not honest
Other groups should be aware…perhaps they are the next to be castigated by the New York Times…..this happened in Germany and it can happen again. Catholics today and another group tomorrow.
Patricia from St. Louis, MO

Juan Williams was purposely targeted by the witch hunters of the extreme left just like the catholic church is being targeted by the left.
Schiller is a hypocrite. Nina Tottenburg violates NPR’s supposed policy constantly and voices her opinions on everything under the sun in extremely left wing prognostications. Therefore it is very apparent that Schiller’s real motives were racist. She wanted to deep six the moderate black commentator off of the left wing plantation to homogenize the appearances of biased unanimity. Racism pure and simple. She might as well have called him a nappy headed hoe.
It is also equally apparent that the NYT has targeted the catholic church for its positions on social issues and is equally bigoted in its editorial content. We have entered an age when the left has declared itself bigoted and venomous and the hatred is increasing ezponentially.[Robert…careful. You are perilously close to being equally venomous and hateful in your comments. Dcn. G.]

Patricia, sorry but there was a pedophile scandal in the Church. According to the John Jay report, 47% of the victims were under the age of 13 at the age of first abuse. This is a considerable number so many children were abused. The number of victims between the ages of 13 and 17 was 53%, this includes boys and girls but 4/5’s of the teen victims (13-17) appear to have been male.

Patricia Cornell,
I hate to burst your little lie, but in the civilized world, sex with children is still considered a bad thing. Whether or not the child being raped has begun shaving or not, whether the girl raped is wearing a training bra or not is, to those of us who actually care about children not being abused irrelevant.
I might also add, well, no I shall add: In Western Europe, sex with someone who has not yet reached their majority by someone who is no longer a minor is pedophilia.
I don’t give two cents what sort of made up legal nonsense you Americans want to throw out to defend the indefensible, rape is rape and your attitude reminds me of the old Jewish proverb: He who eats meat places himself on the same moral level as the butcher.
Had you a conscience, you would be ashamed of yourself.

Deacon Kandra,
I’m leaving. When people are permitted to publish defenses of raping children but my monogamous marriage is considered a threat and a sin, then obviously I am very much in the wrong branch of Christianity.
I wish you, personally, all the best.

Yes, Panthera, it is very troubling to me how many gay young men were exploited and used and abused by clergy and people looked the other way. The Church allowed this to happen and yet now some are on a crusade against same sex adults in committed relationships. I find it very difficult to understand this. Do not feel that you must be silent because you give example by your goodness and your courage in speaking out.

Mark,
What happened in the sex abuse crisis was terribly wrong. Don’t use that wrong to justify another wrong. The fact that people are in a committed realtionship does not make sexual relationships morally right. The expression of sexual love belongs in a marriage between a man an a woman.

You are in my prayers!
Jesus selected & trained His Apostles, who betrayed & denied Him!
Many write “gay young men were exploited and used and abused by clergy”n yet these gay menhave no responsibility????
Come on, let’s be honest here, if they were so offended, why didn’t they just stand up & say “NO!” & report the abuse to protect others?????
Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, Ora Pro Nobis Peccatoribus!
mark

@ MArk
”
The number of victims between the ages of 13 and 17 was ”
Actually according to several studies, including the one done by Jenkins and the one performed by the John Jay College 78,2% of the victims were abused AFTER reaching puberty and 81% were boys.
Now the age of the victim does not excuse for anything, of course, sexual abuse of a minor or even an adult is still terribly wrong.
What happened is horrible and those guity will have to make ammends.
Yet we must remember that those horrible priests who commit such horrible deeds are a very small procentage of the total priests who served the Church and by far not all priests are ‘evil’.
Also this is an harsh lesson for all, hopefully we shall learn from it…

My goodness, where to start…
Mark:
1) “Pedophilia” generally refers to prepubescent children, that is, children who have not yet entered puberty. Puberty can – and does – start well before age 13. Age 9 is not unusual.
2) Do the proponents of ‘gay marriage’ want to permit divorce? The answer is yes, of course, so all this talk about “committed relationship” is an attempt to deceive. Unless, of course, by ‘committed’ one means ‘committed until one or both decide they want out’. Which pretty much describes any relationship.
3) The church speaking out against homosexual relationships is not new. They’ve been doing that from the beginning. What IS new is the ‘crusade’ against gay ‘marriage’, and the only reason for THAT is the fact that our age is the first to even suggest such a thing.
4) The “Church” never “allowed” this to happen. Some people in the Church allowed it to happen by being disobedient to the Church they claimed to serve. They were NOT following Church policy or Church teaching.
Panthera:
“When people are permitted to publish defenses of raping children”… no one here did that. Granted, there ARE people who defend such things, but they are not effectively in communion with the Church. Just like those who defend anything that is inherently disordered.
I believe that Patricia was merely pointing out that the general news media (probably intentionally) uses the wrong term in reporting on this issue. It is never right to spread misinformation, regardless of the reason. And if we’re going to try to address the problem, we have to be honest about what the problem really is. Even if it leads to politically incorrect conclusions.
Not sure why your ‘monogamous marriage’ is a sin, but I suspect that it’s either not really monogamous (as might be the case in a remarriage), or not really a marriage at all (a homosexual relationship).
As for being in the “wrong branch of Christianity”, I’d suggest extreme caution… many look for a christ who agrees with them, and allows them whichever particular practice they don’t want to give up. And when they’ve found that christ, they’ve found a false god.

If a content analysis was performed of the NYT, it would show that the NYT is almost invariably anti-Catholic. Equally invariably, it would who would show that the living reality of the Church–those of us–including the hierarchy– who try to live Christlike lives, is ignored. For us, the sex abuse scandal was a horrible sin. But could we just once have our faith portrayed as what it is–attempting to be a witness of the radical courage and beauty of Christ, who is for the good, despite the decadence and nihilism of our society?
As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said:
“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

Jerry & Vince, the 78% that you mentioned includes children who are 11 and 12 years of ages. I do not consider 11 and 12 year old children to be teens and most kids this age are not post-pubescent. Perhaps some girls are, but most boys are not. Vince you said that for 9 year olds puberty is not unusual. I don’t know where you live but here 9 year olds are in 3rd or 4th grade. I don’t know of nor have I known any boy or man who was in puberty at the age of 9. Are you actually trying to say to me that you men do not consider a man who has sex with an 11 or 12 year old child to be a pedophile? I certainly consider such a man to be a pedophile and a criminal.

And Mark’s comment “includes children who are 11 and 12 years of age” understates the data. The LARGEST single-year cohort of victims were 12 years old when first abused. At 12 years old, a slim majority of girls have reached menarche, but among 12-year-old boys only a very small minority is even just starting puberty.
As someone who has sung along children’s choirs for decades, I use a more colorful description of the numbers: According to the John Jay study, about 4/5ths of the victims were sopranos or altos when they were first abused.
Whenever the subject of clergy sex abuse comes up, invariably someone brings up the absolute falsehood that the John Jay report says that some number between 77% and 81% of all victims were “post-pubescent boys” or were abused “after reaching puberty”. If you add the girl victims in the John Jay study (19.54% of the victims) to the boys aged 1-7 (3.26%), you come up with 22.7%. In other words, in order to come up with 4/5ths of the victims being “post-pubescent boys” you have to be asserting that sexually abusing an 8 year old boy is not pedophilia!
Some people who are claiming this false information seem to be trying to assert that the some vast majority of the victims of clerical sex abuse are old enough to have substantial moral culpability for the sexual contact that took place. Some version of what we saw in press coverage in the 90’s, where the press could always find some idiot Vatican official to tut-tut that it was terrible that in America there were all these teenaged perverts seducing the poor defenseless priests. (BTW, it looks to me that it was then-Cardinal Ratzinger who was in the forefront in getting those Vatican idiots to STFU.)
I confess to being perplexed by the “it’s not pedophilia!” argument. If you look at the John Jay numbers, the largest group of victims, about 60%, are boys and girls aged 10-14 at the initiation of abuse — fourth through eighth grade. The largest age cohort is twelve years old. Sixth grade. So you’re saying “since molesting first graders is worse than molesting sixth graders, molesting sixth graders is no big deal” and somehow it’s supposed to be a defense?!?!? Just who do you think you are defending?!?!?

Thank you for the added information, Cathy. I am very angered that some people feel that 11 to 14 year old children have substantial moral culpability for their own sexual exploitation. Have these people ever heard of grooming? A lot of these predators were masters of manipulation. Plus I wonder how many told children who had limited knowledge of human sexuality that what they were doing was OK with God. You are certainly correct in labeling officials who blamed the victims as idiots. This is a sad part of the clerical culture. A lot of these guys took care of their own.

“I confess to being perplexed by the “it’s not pedophilia!” argument.”
I confess that I am perplexed as to what any of this has to do with the original post of Arch Dolan criticizing the NY Times.
Whether it was little boys or teen boys, or girls of any age it was wrong, wrong, wrong. Period.

Well. RomCath, I think Archbishop Dolan is right in his criticism of the NY Times and I think the newspaper would have more consideration for other religions than it does for the Catholic Church. But I do remember that the nun who taught me History in high school was from New
York City and was a great lover of the New York Times. She always had a copy in her classroom. I wonder what she would think of this.

Mark when I was in High School, we had to read the Sunday Times every week and we would be questioned on current events as reported in the paper. That was a long time ago and I think the Times was much more objective in its reporting than it is today.

Let’s review. The Times runs a theatre review that includes a photo from a play of a man dress like a nun. The Archbishop objects.
On the same day, the New York Post runs several photos of the Venus Erotica Fair of half-naked women in suggestive poses. This fails to merit a word of objection by the Archbishop.
If I were a parent in New York City, it would be the Post and not the Times I would want to keep away from my children. If the Archbishop disagrees, well, he has just made a good arguement for epsicopal celibacy because he would make a lousy parent.

“On the same day, the New York Post runs several photos of the Venus Erotica Fair of half-naked women in suggestive poses. This fails to merit a word of objection by the Archbishop.”
If you read the Archbishop’s objections it is against degrading images of Catholics (eg. nuns & Cardinal O’Connor). No other religious figures are depicted in demeaning ways.
I am sure the Archbishop does not applaud the pictures of half naked women but he was speaking about anti-Catholicsm not pornography per se.

On the question of clerical pediphilia or homosexuality it is obvious that you get the result you want by how you look at the stats and who you call a “child”. From the standpoint of the statistics on the priests, the problem is homosexuality. From the standpoint on the statistics on the underage victims it is mixed pediphilia and homosexuality.
There were about 200 or so true priest pediphiles out of 100,000 priests that abused almost all of the pre-pubescent children who were abused in the report. Here you have Porter, Kos, Groegan, Gauthier, etc. Multiple big time abusers. The number of children involved here is about 3000-4000. Some of these priests were charged and convicted, some were not.
Then as I understand it there were about 300 priets who had actual sex with underage post-pubescent teen girls. There were about 500 victims here. A handful of priests were charged with something
And finally there were about 1000 priests who actually had homosexual sex (not groping, or saying something inappropriate) with post-pubescent teen boys. This counts for about 1500-2000 real victims. The average priest perp here had 1-2 victims.
And then there were about 2000 to 3000 priests who did something less than sex to someone(s) under age that was reprehensible. Most of this was of a homosexual nature.
From the standpoint of the bishops looking at the problems with the priests, they will see the problem as homosexuality because that is what the overwhelming percentage of priests problems are with the abuse thing.

I am sure the Archbishop does not applaud the pictures of half naked women
The record supports what you are sure about. He neither applauds nor has the manhood to raise a syllable of objection. Not where I would expect a Christian leader to be.

“He neither applauds nor has the manhood to raise a syllable of objection. Not where I would expect a Christian leader to be”
That is not what he was addressing in his article. Get it? If you don’t like the POST keep it away from your kids. Be a good parent and stop the pontificating on what the Archbishop should and should not say.

That is not what he was addressing in his article. Get it?
Yeah, I get it. He chooses to discuss the splinter of the Times but does not have the manhood to address the beam of the Post. Got it loud and clear.

Please, the splinter of anti-Catholic bigotry, which I take you buy into, is far more damaging than the scanty clad women in the Post. Have the womanhood to be a good parent and stop blaming the Archbishop for your failures.

RomCath,
I can tell you, I’ve not failed as a parent. My kids don’t read the Post.
If you think that a theatre review of an actor dressed as a nun is far more damaging than soft-core porn sent to the homes of millions of New Yorkers, well, I guess that says something about you.

“If you think that a theatre review of an actor dressed as a nun is far more damaging than soft-core porn sent to the homes of millions of New Yorkers, well, I guess that says something about you.”
Your whole childish rant about the POST and your criticism of the Archbishop tells a great deal about you, your parenting skills and your faith whatever it is. I guess you and your kids never watch TV either.

When will we stop being critical of our Bishop’s? If you are a catholic then act like one. Jesus was miss-quoted and the apostles doubted him as well. That didn’t stop the Catholic Church from moving on did it? We can live without the secular (sensationalism) news as well and focus on doing good as our Lord wishes us to do. Do unto others and you will not have to worry about something that you have no control over. Try living without the news for a few days and watch a miracle happen in your life.
God Bless….

Bishop Dolan is right for speaking out.
HOWEVER, it was far more surprising and troubling to see Bishop Dolan dressed in everyday garb. It’s fine for a priest or Bishop to wear “regular” clothes when in the rectory or on vacation away from their diocese/parish AND not involved in matters of the priesthood.
It is NEVER appropriate for a bishop to speak to the press in regular clothes, NEVER.
I fear Bishop Dolan is another one of those post-Vatican II priests who is very lost in what it means to be a priest or a bishop. Yes he’s a smart good man, but being a priest is about being called to something greater than being a great or good man.
Bishop Dolan you embarrassed yourself, Catholics and degraded the office of Christ’s Apostles by your selfish desires of what you want a bishop to be seen and known as.
He should make an official apology to his diocese and all RC’s
AMDG
HCSKnight[HCSK…I’ve deleted your reference to the NY Times, since you stooped to the level of the ACT UP protestors. Regarding Dolan’s garb: it’s not clear where the reporter tracked him down for his interview, or what the circumstances were. No priest is ALWAYS in clerical attire. (For all we know, he may have been at a private function or on retreat.) They do have days off. Cut him some slack. Dcn.G.

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